Finally Fedora!!! (no I will NOT tell you the harrowing story of how I got there) January 23, 2007

Only a till a few hours ago, I believed I was Fedora-cursed! For over a year I’ve been trying to download/install Fedora, and finally when I BOUGHT a CD… even that didn’t work!!! Fedora just wouldn’t install. And when it finally did, it crashed! I almost gave up, but then I did what any (sane) linux enthusiast would do. I tested on another machine and the Fedora Core 6 DVD passed without a problem. So, it was time to get back to my desktop and try again. And well… I will skip all the gory details of how I got it to work (even though I painstakingly recording each terrible moment). And since the story ended happily, I will just say that… this time… about 6 hours later, it finally worked… and I now have the first Fedora distro I have ever tried on my desktop! (I’m writing this on Fedora 6… and so I no longer believe I’m cursed).

I was impressed by…

1. it has recognised my VIA sound/graphics… everything… something that most distros have failed to do.

2. I thought I’d hate the look, but it’s not so bad (though I of course changed it. Fedora Screenshot below).

3. Speed… though the timer was off, Fedora 6 was much faster than openSUSE 10.2. But of course I installed without Extras. But still, it was much faster.

4. Software installation groupings. I liked the simplicity of selections, though I would have liked just one more layer of selection for more advanced users. The groupings work really well for fast work though.

5. Security features are more robust… you’re forced to be more secure. A nice practice.

Concerns…

1. I’m not able to update through the graphical mode. It’s too slow and I have to Force-Quit (<ctr-alt-esp>). (latest update: I realised that you need to use YUM to install, in the command propt (KONSOLE) mode. Then the updates weren’t slow).

2. I’m not sure how to install Fedora Extras. But I’ll figure that out too. (latest update: see this post)

3. It did not mount my Windows (and Ubuntu CE partitions). But that I think I’ll have to fix as well. (latest update: to mount other non NTFS partitions, it is best to mount it while partitioning the disk during install. When asked to mount disks, I simply mounted my UbuntuCE and my vFAT Windows partitions (not the NTFS)… and chose NOT to format!!! It recognises partitions fine).

4. Finally, it messed up my grub and I lost access to my Ubuntu CE! This is tougher to fix… b/c I don’t know how (other than by reinstalling Ubuntu CE again, which I don’t want to do. But that too is a cross I will have to bear). (latest update: I just couldn’t figure out how to install grub if you choose not to install GRUB in a Fedora install. So I had to reinstall Fedora on my computer. It messed up my Ubuntu install… so then I booted an Ubuntu LiveCD… set up GRUB again, and copied-pasted the Fedora boot code onto the Ubuntu Grub settings. My grub now works fine).

5. Finally, I’m a little concerned with this whole Red-Hat link. It’s more blatant than openSUSE’s Novell link. There’s a lot more Red-Hat here… or maybe I just noticed it more. Anyway, this is not so serious, but Fedora almost feels corporate, rather than community, driven. But that is just the initial impression. (It’s not so bad actually. Like Ubuntu Christian… the branding is not so strong and can be ignored.)

OK. Lot of work to do on this system. But I’ll defer that to later. Right now I’m just relieved (and a little happy) that I’ve got Fedora Core 6 finally on my system. Fedora KDE screenshot below. (desktop background called: “Winter without leaves” or something like that from kde-look.org)